A snowbird shows photos from southwest Florida and southern New England and other places he goes.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Heaven

"Heaven" is the informal name for an out-of-the-way park at the edge of Hartford's downtown. It is a barren concrete space used by skateboarders (and vagrants). The City has unfunded plans to spruce it up and install a real skateboarding facility. Meanwhile, there is a tussle between "legitimate" street artists, who paint authorized murals, and vandals taggers who spray paint junk. Currently just about every surface is covered with graffiti. Expensive downtown offices overlook the park, and the owners of these buildings are not happy with the view.

The City is proposing to permit "art" only on two of the big, formerly blank walls. In my opinion, it is too late to put the cat back in the bag. But, I would like to be wrong.

27 comments:

In Phoenix the solution to two open urban spaces that did not seem to work as plazas for downtown workers was to wipe them out in favor of high density buildings and to give up on attempting to use them for public space.

Hope the city fathers do not go the way of Phoenix, as Dave describes it. Perhaps it's an opportunity for the surrounding community (the landlords and businesses) to step in and pool their resources to redesign the place as an upscale park with different facilities that would discourage these roaming "artists" and vagrants. Is that possible, I wonder?

This is not my favourite kind of street art at all. I suppose they could try commissioning some murals and then taking care of them for a while by cleaning off any tagging. It doesn't always work as my post of today shoes.

I think if the kids are going to use the place for their activities then they cant be told what they can or cant do in the space. It's theirs or the authorities. Maybe that's why no one is using it in your photo?

Yep, I fear tou are correct about it being too late. Even in my village we're seeing spray=paint "art." It's the price of living so close to Toronto and also the price of East Gwillimbury growing , growing, GROWING.